PROTEIN: A Visual Interface for Classification of Partial Reliefs of Protein Molecular Surfaces

〈Summary〉 3D structure of proteins deeply relates to their functionality. It is wellknown that functions of proteins strongly appear in the bumpy parts of the molecular surfaces, and therefore geometric analysis of protein molecular surfaces is important. We propose a technique to extract geometric features of protein molecular surfaces, and a visual interface to effectively visualize the extracted results. Assuming that molecule surfaces are approximated as triangular meshes, the technique extracts groups of triangles forming partial reliefs, calculates their feature values, and finally clusters them according to the feature values. In addition, our technique extracts larger similarly shaped parts consisting of two or more reliefs, by simplifying the triangular meshes and applying the graph route problem. The technique provides a visual interface for visualizing the above results applying a hierarchical data visualization technique ”HeiankyoView”.